Why Obama Won’t Oppose Marijuana Legalization in an Election Year

By
Scott Morgan, Stop the Drug War
on March 8, 2012

The anti-marijuana zealots at the Christian Science Monitor are at it again, pleading with the President to please, please, please help promote pot prohibition. They're frustrated that Vice President Biden traveled all the way to Mexico to lament legalization talk among Latin American leaders, yet the Obama Administration remains silent regarding marijuana legalization measures hitting the ballot in Colorado and Washington this year.

The administration needs to step up and make a strong case against legalization in the US in order to counter a well-financed, well-organized pro-marijuana effort. One argument is that the cartels would actually welcome legalization, in the same way that US casino owners have welcomed state gambling lotteries. To drug dealers, the more addicts the better.

Biden did say a debate in Latin America about legalization would help “lay to rest some of the myths that are associated with the notion of legalization.”

How about he and Obama start to challenge those myths in states like Colorado and Washington? [CSM]

They're not going to do that. See, it really isn't at all a coincidence that Joe Biden happened to not be in America when he made the only anti-legalization remarks of his vice-presidential career. As much as I'd love the notoriously gaffe-prone VP to spend more time discussing his dumb ideas about drugs, he actually knows better than to do that.

In case anyone has managed to miss the memo somehow, a majority of Americans don't want a war on marijuana anymore. Seriously, the Christian Science Monitor should be grateful that the Obama Administration has done as much as it has to piss off the marijuana reformers who helped put this President in office. Alienating half the electorate and way more than half the Obama base with a bunch of pea-brained anti-pot propaganda is more likely to compromise Obama's Colorado campaign than it is to stop the momentum of the marijuana reform movement.

That's why Obama never talks about marijuana, ever, unless publicly forced to do so, and it's also why his Administration has taken no ownership of its outrageous betrayal of the President's pledge to protect medical marijuana patients. From now until November, President Obama will pretend to the very best of his ability that there is no such thing as marijuana. Bet on it.

In fact, if I am wrong, and the President actually engages in the sort of desperate anti-pot posturing proposed by the Christian Science Monitor, I will even buy a subscription to that stupid newspaper just so I can read them gloating over it.